To Sinai and Syene and back in 1860 and 1861 ... Second edition

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TO SINAI AND SYENE AND BACK In 1860 and 1 86 1 a TO SINAI AND SYENE AND BACK In 1860 and 1 86 1. BY WILLIAM BEAMONT, Esquire. " No man is lord of any thing, (Though in and of him there is much consisting), Till he communicates his parts to others." Shakspere. SECOND EDITION LONDON : SMITH, ELDER & CO., 15, WATERLOO PLACE. 1871. TO WILLIAM VIGOR FOX, Esquire, M.A., IN REMEMBRANCE OF THEIR PLEASANT COMPANIONSHIP IN THE JOURNEY WHICH THIS BOOK RECORDS, IT IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED BY HIS FRIEND AND FELLOW TRAVELLER, THE AUTHOR. CONTENTS. Chapter J'AGE I. Prefatory i II. Alexandria and Cairo 12 III. To Sinai 76 IV. The Exodus 14° V. The Desert 158 VI. The Bedouins 164 VII. The Camel 170 VIII. To Syene 1S2 IX. Syene 238 X. The Return 250 XI. Cairo, Alexandria, and Home 319 XII. Conclusion

Chapter I. Pre Fa Tory

THE lamps of heaven and the lamps of earth, these soon to close their eyes for the day and those to open theirs on other realms, were both shining brightly in the crisp air as I wended my way to the railway-station in the early morning. A train is never punctual except when you do not wish it. If you are late it arrives and departs in due time and leaves you behind ; but there is no reciprocity in its punctuality. The man in fustian and the man in scarlet, waiting for the early train, are like sentries in a guard-house half asleep on their post, until the whistle sounds when they Rouse and bestir themselves ere well awake. Few people, even now, set out on a long journey without some misgivings ; but there was a great deal more reason for them when the old philosophers travelled than there is now.

Plato took a cargo of oil, and Herodotus a dragoman, to Egypt to smooth their way and introduce them to the country. We have no record of the particulars of the journeys of Hecatæus or of Demetrius, who was St. Paul's fellow countryman, but we may be sure that it required no ordinary resolution, when the former, in the sixth century before our era, and the latter, about the time of its comr mencement, set out from the distant ports of Miletus and Tarsus to the shores of our remote and then almost unknown island. Without compass, without charts, without steam, and in small craft, theirs was indeed the pursuit of knowledge under difficulties, and not without danger or adventure. The frosty air and my early rising made me ask myself, why I was leaving home and going so long a journey ? I had neither the excuse of seeking health, nor a desire, I hope, of being idle.

The wise men of old travelled to Egypt to grow wiser. It was there Pythagoras learned his doctrine of the transmigration of souls, which taught his followers to illtreat none of heaven's creatures, on which a humane friend's com ment when he saw an animal abused, was to wish that the brute and his master could change places, and that the latter were a horse and the former a butcher's boy riding him ! But there is less to be learned in Egypt now than there was in the days of old, and I could not say that my hopes on that point were very extravagant or ambitious. Neither could I answer my own question with the proverb, " He who has once tasted Nile water longs to taste it again." But I had an answer almost as Eastern, which was, that I had been invited to go and could not help it. While I was waiting for the train I had time to count up some of the things my many advisers had recommended for the journey.

One of them had recommended me to take a large store of provisions, and particularly some potted meats, to be had somewhere in Cornhill. Another, quoting Byron's lines, suggested the proper sauce for them : Be sure you take a stock of Harvey, Lest, perchance, the rogues should starve ye. As to the people I was going amongst another friend gave me his opinion in poetry : Some are so gentle in their natures, That if you speak they answer like a bell ; While others are like nutmeg-graters, And only answer when you drub them well. I'REEA TOR 1 ". 3 All Easterns, he said, were of the latter class ; and he advised me to carry a good kurbash and to use it freely as their best " cureall." Another suggested, as indispensable, a five-barrel revolver and a wholesale stock of powder ; as if I were bent on an Arab foray, and meant to bring in Bedouins by the score.

Another wisely advised me to carry a good stock of books. A punster warned me if I went to the tropic of Cancer not to come back " crabbed." Another, echoing an old prediction, said " a Nilo nihil fit." Several wished that " my shadow might never be less," but none of them told me how to keep it so, or how long it would remain undiminished, if I did not carry out with me a superabundance of temper and patience. One friend told me that the English, who were John Bulls, and the Irish, from whose mouths came " bulls," were privi leged visitors to Egypt, which was especially the land of the Bull. The hop-poles, having served for this year's crop, stood piled in the Kentish fields in rows like the wigwams of an Indian tribe. On the day of my sail across the Channel, Calais seemed too near to Dover by half, for I could distinctly see the former from the latter.

As you pass from England to France the gradation of language is curious : at Dover there is some French, on the steamer a little more ; at Calais there is a little English, and at Paris almost none. I stayed one night at Sens, the capital of old Brennus and his Senones, and wondered that I was not shown there his celebrated " Væ victis " sword, which he threw into the scale when the ransom of the capitol was weighed. The old walls of the city have their massive stone foundations crowned with Roman masonry, showing that the mistress of the world was at last amply avenged for the affront put upon her by Brennus and the children of Sens. The trumpets and the bells, the latter, perhaps, the same which once waked Beckett in his exile at Colomb, both sounded out this morning, calling soldiers to their duty — the soldiers of the Cross to the cathedral, and the others to the parade.

The canon, who officiated at the grand mass, continually stopped to clear his splendid voice and spit his rheum on the marble floor, even in the most solemn parts of the service. Over the altar of his chapel Beckett's tragical end is sculptured in a good style of art. A number of girls, apparently not more than ten or twelve years old, were waiting for their turn to the confes sional, where I hope they had no very serious sins to confess. In the Church of St. Maurice, at Sens, St. Fiacre ' is represented with a hoe ; but a wheel would be more suitable for him who is the patron or name saint of hackney coaches. Nov. 9. — To-day I passed through Dijon and Lyons, the one famed for its wines, and the other for its silks. When the Emperor and Empress lately passed through these places a hundred dozens of the choicest wines of Dijon were pre sented to the Emperor by a hundred of its wine merchants, and a hundred of the richest silk dresses of Lyons were presented to the Empress by a hundred of its silk merchants.

Truly, the French understand well how to compliment royalty. The silk crop in this neighbourhood, which, in 1853, was valued at five millions sterling, is watched with the utmost care. The mulberry-leaves, on which the worms are fed, are supplied by contract at so much per bag, and in this way a dependence is kept up between the animal and the vegetable crop. When the mulberry fails lettuce-leaves are resorted to ; but at other times they are too expensive. When the cocoon is finished they dip it into something which destroys the embryo within, otherwise it would eat its way out, which would prevent the silk from winding ; and thus the 1 Montalembert, in his blanks of the West, makes St. Fiacre the gardener's saint. PREEA TOR ] '. 5 insect is destroyed for the sake of its winding sheet, just as a mummy is destroyed for the sake of its wrappings.

Owing to the little care taken of it, Bengal silk is fit for little else than making crape ; and though more care is bestowed on the Chinese, the Italian, from Lombardy, is better than either, and sells for more than double the price even of silk from China. The annual value of the silk crop of Lombardy is more than six millions, an immense sum to be earned by a worm. The manufacture of silk, which began in the East, has long been eclipsed by the West. Cos, its first seat in Europe, which gave us the lettuce of that name, sometimes the silkworm's food, long kept the manufacture a secret. When Herod the tetrarch, who affected to be, but was not actually what St. Mark calls him, a king (vi. 14), had incurred Cæsar's displeasure and was banished first to Lyons and afterwards to Spain, the Emperor offered to restore his pseudo-wife Herodias her fortune if she would leave him.

When the Baptist reproved Herod for taking her as his wife, she was living surrounded by the splendour and luxury of a court ; and of this sad woman, it ought to be told, that she resisted Cæsar's offer, and clinging to Herod in his reverse of fortune, went with him into exile and shared his poverty as she had shared his splendour. Nov. 10. — Vienne stands beautifully in a gorge between two hills, bordered by a succession of handsome quays, with the Rhone flowing through the middle. The city has a fine old Roman building like the Maison carree at Nismes, which, after having had its windows and intercolumniations blocked up for centuries, is now being restored and converted into a museum. The restorations, so universal, may characterize this age as a new era of renaissance in France. Pontius Pilate in exile at Vienne, fulfilling a poet's prophecy — The time Shall come, when terror shall reveal to thee Thy soul still coloured with the crimson stain, threw himself, in a fit of despair, from the Tower of Solomon, and was drowned in the Rhone which flows below.

Below Vienne, and just opposite Tain, is the Hermitage Mountain whence we have the wine of that name, which the celebrated Wilberforce was the first to introduce into England. From Vienne to our northern counties, though comparatively an easy journey now, was once far otherwise, and during the Roman occupation of Britain very many of the legionaries fell early martyrs either to their long march, or to the rigour of our climate on their arrival. One of these, Lucius Duccius Rufinus, a native of Vienne,2 and the standard-bearer of the Eleventh Legion, far from his home and friends, died in his twenty-eighth year at York, where his monumental effigy may still be seen in the museum. (Welb. Eburacum, 113, 14.) At Vienne, this morning, the ground was sealed hard with frost ; while at Valence, which is at no great distance, the sun was bright, and the air warm and genial as summer.

The country about St. Charmes was so thickly covered with stones and boulders that it looked as if they might have fallen in a shower. Tradition says that Jupiter threw them down as ammunition for Hercules ; but if so, why didn't the Thunderer take the battle into his own hands, and decide it himself? Nov. n. — I heard two good sermons from Mr. Meyer, the chaplain at Marseilles, in one of which he said that Mahomet was the falling star mentioned in the ninth chapter of the Apocalypse. Our neighbours love to represent John Bull with a goodly rotundity of person, but I have seen more Frenchmen with fat paunches than I ever saw Englishmen so distinguished at home. In this city I once knew five bachelor brothers, who had the misfortune to lose their mother, who had presided over 2 There is a tomb of Caius Valerius Tullus, another soldier from Vienne who died at Magna on the wall given in Bruce's Roman Wall, pp. 245, 246.

PREFATORY. 7 their house and table. It was necessary that some lady should take her place, and they held a family conference to see how this could be brought about, when they decided that one of them should marry. None of them would volunteer for this service, the eldest pleading exemption for his age and the youngest for his youth, and some of the others because, as they said, the hardest burden was always thrown on them, so it was decided to determine the matter by lot. The lot fell upon the third brother, who, acquiescing in his fate, married a wife, who took the head of thetable, and every thing went on as before. Monumental honours used to be paid to saints ; they are now paid to genius, and on this prin ciple a statue has just been erected at Marseilles to Puget, a local sculptor. From my room up six high flights of stairs, I look out on miles of red roofs, and a whole forest of staring towers and chimneys.

Treading on the uncarpeted and tiled floor of a French bedroom with bare feet makes the teeth chatter like dipping the toes into cold water. Nov. 12 — I embarked in the Valetta, a steamer of 260 horse-power, belonging to the Peninsular and Oriental Com pany, or as a merry friend calls it for shortness, the P. & O, which he says is never out of P.O.cket. She had anchors with flukes moving on pivots, which allow them to fold up so as to occupy less space when hauled in and out of use. A strong breeze from the south had been blowing in squalls directly in the teeth of our course since yesterday, on which account, I think, we were less prompt in our preparations for starting, but at eleven o'clock my forty-five fellow-passengers and the mails, which filled six large lighters — the English mails packed in tin, the Dutch in deal, and the French in paper — being all on board, we steamed out of the harbour, and were soon at sea, where our little ship rocked like a cradle, but without its effect, for it did not tend to induce sleep.

Nov. 13.— In the night the wind rose to a gale, and the ship reeled and tossed from side to side under the buffeting of the waves. Now and then a wave, baulked of its aim and bursting short of the ship, broke over her, and came pouring down the hatchways like a hundred shower baths. In the midst of the commotion one great wave struck the ship from stem to stern, upon which she quivered and stood still, and there was a loud snap, as if a paddle had broke, followed by a crack over head, which made the subalterns sleeping in the deck-house believe that they had parted company with the ship, and were at sea on their own account. Towards morning the wind abated, the sea went down, and " there was a great calm." Where did the Psalmist, who makes so many and such just allusions to the sea, gain his experience of it ?

Nov. 14. — Yesterday we were threatened with danger from without, to-day it was from within, for an over-heated crank began whistling like the boatswain. To cure it, it was treated to copious doses of cold water, and after a while the whistling first intermitted, then changed to a cricket's chirp, and finally died away. I heard the sailors use the word belay, for " to make fast," just as it is used by the sailors in Shakspeare's play of the Tempest. Nov. 15. — A fleet of little skiffs, each carrying a single sail, and governed by a single sailor, who holds the guide rope, announced our approach to Malta. As the wind fills the sails of these small craft, which are scudding about in all directions, they look like the fairy cock-boats, or cockle shells, manned by Cupids, which we see in Etty's pictures, or the paintings of a modern decorator.

The moment you land at Malta you are accounted lawful prize by a host of guides, touters, beggars, and rock scorpions, who fasten on you with a pertinacity you can hardly shake off. If you take one of them as a guide, it is ten to one he can tell you nothing, not even the names of the commonest plants or flowers. One PREFATORY. 9 guide hands you over to another without your knowledge, and in spite of your will, until you hardly know in whose hands you are. I never knew what a true Maltese cross was before. The jewel, in that form, which an Assyrian king wears on his breast in his sculptured effigy in the British Museum, as if to prove that there is nothing new under the sun, was not more truly a Maltese cross than mine. There were aloes twenty feet high with woody stems, which if not the lign aloes of scripture, must certainly be lign, or wood aloes of another kind.3 Another plant, called Bint-y-consul or the consul's daughter, with its upper leaves of bright scarlet, was dazzling in its brilliance.

I should like to see it introduced into England. There were oleanders in full bloom, and a shrub like a laurel, but with leaves more full and fleshy. Although it is now near winter, the sun was dazzling and the weather hotter than our midsummer. In the great church at Valetta, which, like the city, was founded by its great grand-master of that name, the chancel gates of the chapel of the Holy Sacrament are of silver, and above them hang three sets of rusty keys, each with an inscription signifying where it came from and who placed it there. One set were the keys of Rhodes, brought thence after its glorious but unsuccessful defence by L'lsle Adam. But I missed the silver keys which once opened and shut in Jeru salem, and the keys which shut in Rhodes when it resisted and finally drove back Demetrius and a besieging force of 40,000 men ; the former, I believe, are preserved at Rome, and the latter have encountered the fate of the things which were "ante Agammenona."

The church is paved with memorials of departed knights, and amongst them of Villiers de L'lsle Adam, the celebrated defender of Rhodes ; of John de Valetta, the equally celebrated, but more successful, defender of Malta, and of many other grand masters and men of renown. There is a good painting 8 See a representation in Kitto's Bible, vol. ii. p. 578. of the beheading of John the Baptist, by Caravaggio, in the church. Our English money, which had suffered a sort of syncope in France, here, where the air is English, breathed freely again and felt its circulation quickened. Nov. 1 6. — At Malta we took in fresh coals. Hour after hour the black mineral, which suits a strong digestion, and is the food which speeds the Valetta on her way, was poured into her capacious maw and stowed away in the depths below.

When night set in, and darkness brooded over the deep, she pursued her course, beating the dark sea with her busy paddles until it grew white with foam. All the next day no living thing of earth, air, or sky was to be seen ; and to all seeming we might have been on the back of some fabled monster, such as that which mariners are said to have mistaken for an island, and have been borne onward by it over the waste of waters, conscious all the while of the throb bings of its strong pulse, the plashing and beating of its flappers, and the breathing of its dark smoky nostrils. The days, which are decreasing in heat and length at home, are here (30 degrees east of London, and 22 degrees south of Lancashire) growing longer and hotter, so that, reversing the version of our folk lore, we may say — The day lengthens, The heat strengthens.

Nov. 17. — This morning we are off Lybia, and see at a distance " Cyrene's torrid soil," which had once its citizens, who were known in profane as well as sacred history. Eratosthenes, the first to teach astronomical geography, and, perhaps, the first to measure a degree of the meridian, was one of the former, and Hegesias, a lecturer on philosophy at Alexandria, and the Egyptian Burton, who happily did not, like his English disciple, practise as well as teach the doctrine of melancholy, was another. In the time of Simon the Cyrenian, who bore our Lord's cross, and on the day of PREFATORY. 11 Pentecost, when many Cyrenians were present and helped to spread the knowledge of the miracle, the country, which is now a desert, was a rich and flourishing region. Nov. 1 8. — To-day we assembled for divine service under an awning on the quarter-deck, and heard a sermon from the text, " Give an account of thy stewardship," in which the preacher inculcated on his hearers — most of them travellers to distant countries — the duty of a circumspect walk and conversation amongst the people to whom they were going, so as to give them no occasion to despise or speak ill of the Cross.

Except a solitary boatswain-bird, we have seen neither a sail nor anything living to-day. Nil nisi pontus et aer. This evening we were off Alexandria at nightfall, but vessels are not allowed to enter the harbour at night, and we must therefore lie to until the morning.

Chapter II. Alexandria And Cairo

Nov. 19. — BEFORE dawn to-day some faint saffron streaks shot up into the eastern sky, then the lower edge of a floating cloud was gilded, afterwards the sky flushed with rosy light, and finally the sun came up unclouded and with dazzling splendour. Presently a pilot pushed off to us, and by his aid we threaded our way through the intricate entrance into the harbour of Alexandria, and, letting go the anchor, were soon riding at ease alongside a Russian frigate. In a moment a cloud of Arabs descending upon the ship, proffered their services to help her, help us, help everybody, and everything. " Babel is come again," thought I, as with endless noise and clatter they rushed here and there and everywhere. So making haste to enter a boat and row ashore, I escaped their din for a few minutes, but it was renewed with double vehe mence when I landed at the custom-house stairs, where, if I had not resisted, I should have had two men carrying each parcel of my small baggage.

A steamer in sight is sure to call up this swarthy cloud, and no wonder, for European travellers come to Egypt as Irish labourers come to England, for the harvest, with this difference, however, that while the latter come to reap, the former are the harvest to be reaped. The custom-house officers were civil and obliging, and gave me no cause of complaint, except that they made me open and re-pack my baggage on the stairs and not under cover. On the custom-house steps, as if to demand the traveller's homage to their country, there were lying a ram headed statue, and the mutilated figures of several other deities covered with hieroglyphics. From the custom-house to the railway, the way, which was all dream-land, or like a scene in the Arabian Nights, led through narrow, unpaved, picturesque bye-streets, unlike anything to be seen in Europe, or anything you have seen before — streets of which the character is not much altered since the memorable 16th July, 622, when tha prophet fled to Medina, and his religion, which has reigned in Egypt ever since, was born.

Every house is flat-roofed, and built either of sunburnt bricks or mud, and occasionally chunammed to a glittering whiteness. Every person was dressed in a costume which was new and strange. Here a few men scantily clothed, and with skins of water, not so large as the monsters which Athenæus says held 3,000 jars of wine, but still larger than that water-bottle of the same kind which Abraham put on Hagar's shoulder when he sent her away with Ishmael, and slung, like hers, across the shoulder, were discharging their contents on the streets to cool the air and lay the dust. In two schools, which were near, a number of boys were sitting cross-legged, and repeating their lessons all at once in a kind of sing-song chorus, their bodies swaying to and fro all the while like a Chinese toy. Now some camels, marching along with measured and noiseless step, brushed me on each side, and "the next moment I was nearly run over by a donkey in full gallop.

Here some bundles, resembling inflated balloons, each said to contain a specimen of nature's fairest work, a woman, came merrily along perched on the backs of donkeys. To these succeeded groups of men of every nation, complexion, and costume — Arabs, Nubians, and Europeans — black, brown, olive, white, and fair. Some had only white, dull blue, or crimson shirts, with red, white, or dark turbans. Others had bornouses, with hoods like a Carthusian cowl, either pure white, or striped blue and white, or brown and white. Some in still smarter attire, had vests and shawls of showy colours, dark or light blue, green, blue and white, chintz of various patterns, and strangest of all, the new colour magenta. To complete the picture, there were the pasha's soldiers in uniform, and the railway servants in official costume.

The genus porter is one of the necessary evils of travel. He is like the horse-leech's daughter, whose perpetual cry is " give, give." To-day, when the men who had carried my baggage clamoured for more pay, I handed them over to my dragoman as an arbitrator between us, but when he went away and I was at their mercy, I was in danger of being clamoured to death. They did not, or would not, understand my bad Arabic, but they did understand my worse Latin, and desisted when I muttered — " Cantab it vacuus," and turned my pockets inside out to show them that I had no Egyptian money. Everything has an end, even Eastern delay, though that is very long-lived in Egypt, and the train at length was off. Except the railway, itself a novelty to the natives, everything was new and strange to me. For many a mile, the country, flat and level as a bowling-green, had evidently been recently overflowed, and in many places it was still covered with the Nile or its receding slime.

The agriculturist in Egypt recognises only three seasons — vegetation, harvest, and inun dation. The first called Es Shittah, which is both winter and spring, begins about a month before our autumn, and ends in February ; the second is Esseyb or summer ; and the third, which is El Hareef, or autumn, begins in July and includes the period of the inundation. In many places for miles in extent, Indian corn sown before the inundation, and now fast growing ripe, waved over the plain. In other places crops of birseem or clover, sown as the waters were subsiding, carpeted the landscape with delicious green. Here there was a large plantation of cotton, and there another of sugar-cane. Twice the railway crossed the mighty source of all this bound less fertility, the broad and wondrous river which Broods o'er green Egypt with its wave of mud, And pours through many a mouth its branching flood.

Virg. Georg. IV. 290. In one field a man was ploughing, like Elisha, with twelve yoke of oxen, and " he with the twelfth," and a plough differ ing but little from that seen in the hieroglyphics of 2,000 years ago. In another field there was a norag, a sort of chair moving on rollers, which they occasionally use to press out the grain instead of treading it with oxen. Here there was a herd of buffaloes, with horns turned back and hunches above their shoulders, real bond fide natives, and not like the elephants which Mr. Barnum imported on the Ohio, and yoked to his plough, to attract notice and make himself talked about, whenever he expected a train or a steamer to pass. In another place, some tall gaunt camels, with limbs loosely hung, in perfect contrast to the elephant's solid form, moved statelily along ; and then a donkey, with a stout Turk on his back, tripped away more lightly and gaily than I ever saw donkey at home.

Here there was a herd of goats, with black silken skins, long lop ears, and delicate limbs ; and there mixed, as of old, with the goats, was a flock of black and brown sheep, with manes like a lion, and long beards like a goat, the tragelaphus of Pliny, and the hirco cervus of Dr. Caius, of Cambridge, and Shakspeare celebrity, whom Cambridge honours as a benefactor, and Shakspeare makes merry with as a foreigner, but who, nevertheless, was one of the most learned physicians of his time, and has never had justice done him as the naturalist who first described this sheep and various other animals in 1561, exactly three centuries ago. Then there were Arab horses and strong mules, and dogs with sharp snouts, broken hair, and a thoroughly wolfish look. Of the feathered creation, I saw buffaloe-birds, storks, " sworn foe to snakes," and once visitants of England, white ibises, abou gerdans, or gardes des bceufs, (ibis media, the symbol of the soul : would that all souls were as pure !) and swallows who have found in this winter of Egypt the summer which they sought and failed to find last year in England.